Working on sprucing this one up. It's been split into 2 4k banks...with the display portion in the first bank (so that up to 2k of additional graphics can be added). I'm still not clear on how the monsters get their direction info, but I ran a test using 4 animation frames for each. Kind of spastic, but getting close

Also, the death animation has been expanded a bit (but it does throw the timing off a bit). Will be adding in vertical bitmaps for the Pac-Man sprite as well (first thing I did was get rid of that stupid eye and overbite).

The color info has been fixed, and will now switch between B&W/Color correctly.

Anyway to make the "wafers" white? Or is that more indepth? I suspect that somewhere in the code (that I have NO idea how to read) that the wafers are sharing color instantiation with the walls. Is that the case?

No way to seperate the dots' color from the maze color...they are all made out of playfield GFX. In order to accomplish that, the game kernal would need to be very different...and need to skip scanlines that display maze walls when it's displaying dots (leading to gaps in the walls on those scanlines).

No offense meant to Nukey’s hacking skills in the least bit but, IMHO, the best that anyone could hope to get from Atari’s Pac-Man is shinola!

That's the whole idea...to see how the existing game could be tweaked to be more like the original. The hard part is going to be trying to change the sprite flicker. Right now, it's at 15hz for the monsters and 60hz for the player and bonus object. It might be possible to divide all of those objects to be at 20hz instead without having to use any complex multiplexing (which there is zero time left in the kernal to do). Sure, the player would flicker, but it would make it possible for fruit shapes - and the monsters wouldn't look as flickery.

I love this hack! Nukey, are you using RORG this time? :wink: Also, love the ghost eyes. Reminds me of the HH player (wish I had the skills to do that in Adventure!) Will you be working on the maze later? You are like an unstoppable freight train, or something.

Nah...I haven't really been getting all the labelling done and such. Just picking at it for the hell of it. Current problem is trying to get the sound routine to read more than 4 notes without pausing for a long stretch (that part of the code is currently commented out, since I can't figure out where that delay is coming from).

Current things fixed:
The eyes are now always white, and the copyright notice has been changed into a logo.

And yeah, RORG's are being used. Much easier than trying to keep track of things in seperate assemblies. Here's the current one so far, and the current binary...sure wish that Edit was enabled

As far as improving flicker...no. Sprite0 would still be split among the 4 monsters (the existing energizers are all missile0 and do not affect the flicker of sprite0).However, making the energizers use playfield GFX instead would increase the amount of cycle time that I could "reclaim" within the kernal...since no time would be wasted in handling the missile0 object (Note: playfield GFX is also used in Hack'Em...the energizer if still uneaten is ORA'ed into the dot data). An interesting wrinkle here would be to use Missile0 as the bonus "vitamin" instead of missile1 - with missile 1 free it could be used as a backdrop for the monster's eyes (it would be yellow, but it's better than nothing).